The Florida Education Association spent years telling parents they existed to protect teachers and serve students.
Then a video surfaced of a speaker at an FEA press conference telling Florida students to walk out of class and protest federal law enforcement.
Now Florida's Education Commissioner and the legislature are asking one very simple question: if this union can't even get 18% of eligible teachers to vote for it, why does it get to speak for all of them?
Florida Education Association Recertification Elections Reveal a Broken System
At Florida A&M University, three votes – out of 202 eligible graduate assistants – was enough to certify a union as the exclusive bargaining representative for the entire bargaining unit.
Three votes.
At the University of South Florida, 41 people out of 2,169 eligible employees handed one union legal authority over everybody's pay, benefits, and working conditions.
That's less than 2%.
In Gadsden County, only 15% of eligible instructional employees voted to recertify their union.
Florida law handed that union exclusive bargaining rights for everyone anyway.
Out of 125 union recertification votes held in Florida K-12 schools between March 2025 and January 2026, only five secured support from more than half the eligible workforce.
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Five out of 125.
The rest kept their exclusive bargaining authority anyway – because under current Florida law, all you need is a simple majority of ballots cast, even if almost nobody showed up.
SB 1296 and HB 995 Would Require Unions to Earn Their Power
Florida Education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas and Freedom Foundation CEO Aaron Withe published an op-ed this week calling out this rigged system by name – and backing legislation to fix it.
House Bill 995 and Senate Bill 1296 would require unions to demonstrate genuine support before claiming to speak for thousands of Florida workers.
Under the proposed bills, unions that already have 60% of eligible workers paying dues get automatic recertification – no election required.
Every other union has to prove majority support from the full workforce, not just whoever bothers to cast a ballot.
Critics call the bar too high.
Those same critics are apparently fine with three people deciding workplace representation for 202 others.
The bills also take direct aim at another abuse: right now, public employees can take paid leave – on the taxpayer's dime – for union activities that have nothing to do with collective bargaining.
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That includes political campaigns, fundraising, and lobbying.
The new legislation preserves paid leave for legitimate contract work and grievances.
Everything else goes unpaid.
The Florida Teacher Walkouts Reveal What the FEA Actually Stands For
The FEA student walkout moment wasn't a bug – it was the feature.
The FEA's parent organization, the National Education Association, passed a resolution at its national conference explicitly backing efforts to help students organize protests.
When the video surfaced of the FEA press conference, Spar stayed silent until parents started pushing back.
Then he claimed the speaker was just an "activist" – not the union, not a member, not a representative.
The video showed union leaders nodding along in the background as it was said.
At the State Board of Education meeting on February 20, members put it on the record: the FEA "publicly promoted student protests during valuable instructional hours and then stayed silent while students faced disciplinary actions that could affect their permanent records."
Governor DeSantis summed it up even more simply: "Our kids are not pawns for political activism. Education, not indoctrination."
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This is what teacher unions look like when they answer to activists instead of actual teachers.
They organize anti-ICE protests on school time and push their parent organization's radical political agenda onto teenagers.
Then they hide behind bureaucratic language when parents demand answers.
HB 995 and SB 1296 are not anti-union bills.
The only unions threatened by this legislation are the ones that have already lost the trust of the workers they claim to represent.
Three votes doesn't represent anyone.
It represents a handful of activists with outsized power over thousands of people who never asked for them.
Florida is right to demand better.
Sources:
- Anastasios Kamoutsas and Aaron Withe, "Florida Teachers Unions Have Lost Their Way," RealClearEducation, February 25, 2026.
- Florida Department of Education, "State Board of Education Admonishes Statewide Union for Encouraging Students to Protest," FLDOE Press Release, February 20, 2026.
- Florida Senate Staff Analysis, PCS/SB 1296, Senate Committee on Governmental Oversight and Accountability, 2026.
